Fran Kelly Must Be Joking

It looks like Fran Kelly has given up left-wing activism ‘journalism’ for stand-up comedy.

Veteran ABC journalist Fran Kelly strode to the stage at a posh hotel in Sydney on Friday night to deliver the annual Andrew Olle Media Lecture, and almost immediately issued some helpful advice for her industry colleagues.

To put it into perspective for Good Oil readers, imagine a hideous mutation of Jessica Mutch McKay and Tova O’Brien, wrapped up in the skin of a sanctimonious, taxpayer-funded tilty-head who openly bragged of being an ‘activist’.

So, it can only have been firmly tongue-in-cheek when she pontificated:

Don’t ever make the story about you.

This is the same ‘journalist’ who whined, during the debate over same-sex marriage that she was “interviewing people… who were basically criticising me, my lifestyle, my parenting values, the impact of my lifestyle on my children”. No, they weren’t. You’re making the story about you.

Telling isn’t the same as reporting.

This is a particular hoot, coming from the interviewer who repeatedly cut off coalition politicians talking about energy policy to claim that ‘scientists are telling us…’ Which is the same ‘people say…’ gambit the late George Negus got so memorably called out on by Margaret Thatcher: ‘Then name them.’ Kelly’s constant interruptions were her dodgy way of telling everyone her opinions – “One thing was clear from Glasgow: this is the critical decade, this decade now… we’re going to run out of time” – and dressing it up as ‘reporting’.

And serve up facts. Verified facts.

Surely that knee-slapper brought the house down.

After all, it was Kelly who finger wagged that “fossil fuel subsidies, as the latest figure I could find, costs the Federal taxpayer more than $7 billion annually”. In fact, those aren’t “subsidies”, they’re tax breaks. A very different beast. But then, the ABC is the same network which published such obvious nonsense from its senior economics correspondent that it had to be withdrawn and corrected.

Kelly also touted the Democrat scare story on ‘Project 2025’, declaring “it says some pretty radical and pretty scary stuff, quite frankly, I think”. There’s that opinion posing as reporting thing again.

Sage tips, from top to bottom. Kelly didn’t name any names, of course.

But it didn’t go unnoticed that her speech – which focused on the importance of truth in reporting, and the dangerous creep of disinformation and misinformation – was delivered less than a month after ABC managing director David Anderson commissioned an independent review into issues relating to the broadcaster’s coverage of a Special Forces operation in Afghanistan in 2012.

That was the one where the audio was doctored to make it sound as if six shots were fired from a helicopter, instead of just one. The ABC news director admitted that it was ‘incorrectly edited’, and removed it from all ABC platforms.

Kelly would have no shortage of fodder for lambasting ‘misinformation’ from the ABC’s archives. For instance, its four-part ‘expose’ on flagship current affairs program, Four Corners, peddling the now-debunked ‘Russian collusion’ narrative. Despite even mainstream US media conceding the story was fake news, the ABC has never issued an apology or retraction.

More recently, the ABC aired apparently misleading, ‘activist-led’ stories on both nuclear energy and aged-care homes.

But Kelly is clearly playing for laughs.

In her speech, Kelly addressed the challenges she and her ABC colleagues faced when covering the voice to parliament referendum last year.

“It is one year since the referendum that proved to be a case study of the widening fissures in our society and the distorting ­impact misinformation and disinformation can have on our democratic processes,” she said.

Please, stop. My sides are aching.

No doubt bringing the house down, Kelly finished with this cavalcade of zingers.

“On the voice, on climate science, on the Middle East, on Covid. Whatever it is. Less commentary, more reporting. Less telling, more inquiry […] some reporters prefer to be activists and crusaders rather than fact-finders or straight reporters. They enjoy their heroic status among the tribes of social media or their subscribers. I’m not sure they can even identify their own bias.

“The job is not telling the audience what to think; it’s giving them the fullest set of facts possible so they can make up their own minds what to think.”

Cue howls of laughter.

Fran ‘I’m an activist’ Kelly, folks. She’s here all week, try the chicken.